New Delhi: Congress leader Sonia Gandhi on Monday slammed the Modi government’s education policy, charging its core agenda is centralisation of power, commercialisation and outsourcing of investments to the private sector, and communalisation of textbooks.
Noting that these three Cs haunt Indian education today, the Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson said in an article that this “carnage” of India’s public education system must end.
In the article “The ‘3Cs’ that haunt Indian education today” in The Hindu, Gandhi said the introduction of the high-profile National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, has hidden the reality of a government that is profoundly indifferent to the education of India’s children and youth.
“The Union Government’s track record over the last decade has convincingly demonstrated that in education, it is concerned only with the successful implementation of three core agenda items -- the centralisation of power with the Union Government; the commercialisation and outsourcing of investments in education to the private sector, and the communalisation of textbooks, curriculum, and institutions,” she said.
Gandhi charged that “unchecked centralisation” has been the hallmark of this government’s functioning over the last 11 years, but its most damaging consequences have been in the domain of education.
She noted that the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), comprising ministers for education in both the Union and state governments, has not been convened since September 2019.
Even while adopting and implementing a paradigm shift in education through the NEP 2020, the government has not seen it fit to consult state governments on the implementation of these policies even once, she noted.
“It is a testament to the Government’s singular determination not to heed any voice other than its own, even on a subject that is squarely in the Concurrent List of the Indian Constitution,” she claimed in the article.
“The lack of dialogue is accompanied by a ‘bullying tendency’. Among the most disgraceful acts committed by this government is the coercion of state governments to implement the PM-SHRI (or PM Schools for Rising India) scheme of model schools by withholding the grants due to them under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) as leverage,” she said.